The Charleston Saga (Cont'd): Where Future BigLaw Partners Can't Appreciate Good Business

What would YOU do if your Titanic of a law school was on the brink of sliding into the icy Atlantic?

My guess is that - as sensible, decorous people - you would quietly pack up to your office and discuss what BigLaw firms had contacted you about vacant partnerships.

Well, at CSOL, a minority of rabble-rousing idiots have decided to print a lunkheaded editorial in the local paper that violates their duty of confidentiality.  Get a load of this nonsense:

First, in the years immediately preceding the sale to InfiLaw, the owners distributed to themselves as profits $25 million in student-paid (often federally-guaranteed) tuition dollars. Those distributions depleted a multi-million dollar “rainy-day” fund, which the owners had assured the American Bar Association would remain in place to shelter the school against economic downturns. This profit-taking weakened the once financially vibrant law school. 

Okay, first of all, nothing that is said to the ABA counts.  The ABA is just a rubber stamp.  You say - and do - what you have to so they say yes, and then you do whatever the fuck you want.  You know that library?  That's only there because the ABA asked.  Your tenure status only exists because CSOL had to go through the motions to get accredited.  Accreditation is like being the chick in the sorority who desperately wanted a husband to support her idle shopping habits.  You do what you have to do to get the ABA to say "I do," and then you do the bare minimum so the ABA doesn't pull a LaVerne on you. 

Telling half-truths to quasi-regulators isn't just an American tradition; it's also fun.

Now let's learn more about what these idiots don't understand about the adult world:

Second, two of the five owners voted to buy out two of the others, thereby obtaining the votes needed to ink the InfiLaw deal. This buyout was accomplished through an InfiLaw loan, with the resulting millions in new debt strapping the school still further. 

Third, the remaining owners (by a 2-1 vote) hired InfiLaw as a “consultant,” at a numbing price tag that roughly equaled what 16 law students pay yearly in tuition. 

Board machinations and sweetheart consulting deals are the sine qua non of American business.

These aren't moves to be scorned in public, but rather to be applauded, copied, learned from.  The part where these gentlemen loaned money to buy out co-owners so they could secure a lucrative sale to the lender?  Buy that man a drink at the clubhouse!

Good God, you faculty members (along with the wicked state government) willfully and ridiculously obstructed this transaction with the ignorance of a child.

You all are like the kids in Scooby Doo.  There's the hippie stoner, the dorky feminist whatever, the upright closeted gay guy, and the mildly hot one.  I'm sure there are echoes on the faculty.  It's like you little bastards chased a bunch of clues and now you've pulled back the curtain, pulled off the mask, shone the spotlight:  IN-FI-LAW!?!?

That's juvenile kid shit.  Cross over to the world of grownup ethics, where bilking and conning others, manipulating federal programs and closely-held "public service" corporations for millions, should lead you to a better place, instead of having to ruin a perfectly good afternoon explaining life to a bunch of stupid law graduates in an empty office building.

It's times like this I wish the law graduate market weren't so robust, because these clowns really don't deserve to waltz into BigLaw partnerships.  

But they will, and they'll profit mightily, savoring the million-dollar degree, inflated, no doubt, by CSOL's probable closing.  And they say they have no self-interest...